New Yorker magazine alert thread

lane - good
denby - terrible

alex ross - good
sfj - hit or miss

james wood and some of the other bros - ok
adam gopnik - f this dude

poor joan acocella

"some of the other bros"

if you are a(n american) sports fan, it's def worth reading ben mcgrath on concussions in football

― mookieproof, Sunday, January 30, 2011 12:21 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

this one from 2009 is a great read too: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell

― gr8080, Tuesday, February 1, 2011 2:11 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I was like wtf big-upping a Gladwell piece, but after I read it, it's actually a little bit better on both the medical side and the moral side (though I can imagine people thinking that MG is stretching the analogy).

lol malcom gladwell hating is such an ILX cliche

lol so is ur face. ^_^

i'm a big peter schjalujkojahl fan. forget who the other art critic is.

i dont think they have a second art critic. not in the back of the book.

and yea i like schjeldahl too. dont always agree with him but hes a great writer.

I can see that Gopnik is incredibly intelligent and a deft, original prose writer but something about him aggravates the hell out of me. It's self-conscious "fine writing" of the kind that James Wood is always slamming in fiction.

I saw that Ben McGrath was 34 and that he'd first contributed in 2002. I don't know how anyone gets to be a New Yorker contributor but certainly not a 25/26-year-old. Do you just get the call one day? Do you hang around the office until they get tired of telling you no? Do you have to make your bones, mob-style?

WS James Surowiecki any day of the week.

No really, he's hot.

he used to live on my block

Where does he live now, I will run to him

he and his poetess wife moved elsewhere, sorry

john seabrook on crowds/stampedes is v. interesting

ben mcgraths dad used to be the magazines fiction editor

had never heard of that hillsborough soccer disaster, that photo is srsly something -

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01380/HillsboroughDisast_1380793c.jpg

ben mcgraths dad used to be the magazines fiction editor

Mystery solved. Not to say he's not a good writer.

hey someone just posted this to facebook

ahem cobble hill was NOT rough when you moved there in 2002 . . honky please . . i know its the new yorker but still

whats it abt, seems like a good topic to discuss here

true, but the dude wrote that in a piece about his wife dying, so maybe it should slide

What article is that? I don't remember and I have opinions, as somebody who lived in Cobble Hill in 2002.

yeah, jesus, it's like the saddest story ever.

it's the personal history one from this weeks issue. xp

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_fact_goldman

my cousin lived in cobble hill in 2002, someone got murdered in the house next to hers

There really isn't many parts of any big city, especially one that's this diverse, that isn't a stone's throw from some less safe neighborhood. Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens are some of the most desirable streets in Brooklyn and are filled with wealthy, wealthy people, living 1 block from a relatively bad housing project. I haven't read the story yet, but while I'd certainly say that by 2002 most of Cobble Hill was gentrified, doesn't mean you wouldn't find yourself in a rough area if you walk 1 block in the wrong direction. And it's still that way.

lots of mafiabros iirc

True, but they never mugged my friend who lived a block away!

John Lurie discussing his questionable New Yorker profile:

http://www.jambands.com/features/2011/02/01/john-lurie-sustains/

ruth franklin's article on h.g. adler is really good (01/31/11 issue)

Working my way through the Guillermo del Toro, and actually my biggest gripe is how the reporter renders del Toro's speech into stilted sound bites, when I remember him speaking a lot more expansively and dynamically.

the funniest thing about that profile was the paragraph he devotes to giving clueless new yoker readers a little background on who this h.p. lovecraft fellow is

I seem to recall Oliver Sacks' last two articles being pretty great, and I'm surprised they hadn't been mentioned yet (since he was mentioned in the NPR or Radiolab thread). Anyway, they're both behind the pay wall. :(

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_sacks (2010/08/30)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/28/100628fa_fact_sacks (2010/06/28)

i was like ok i dont have much 2 do this morning, ill print out this paul haggis/scientology article....it's 49 pages!

And it's a tease of a forthcoming book, no?

The best bits of the Haggis piece come at the end, btw, with the revelation of some brazen church-contradicting forgeries. Not that you should skip to the end of anything.

The biggest (so to speak) revelation of the del Toro piece is how ... hefty the guy is. 300 pounds! But dude is clearly smart and knows his nerd stuff.

man do i hate paul haggis

oh i read the whole thing. but yeah, that stuff abt hubbards war records was prob the most damning

the whole thing was just like parenthetical denials of every claim idk scientologys tenets seem like ideas a bratty little kid would come up with - ie. it's sacrilidge & damaging to us for non members to read our scriptures, etc

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/02/07/110207ta_talk_paumgarten

Enjoyed this quick profile of The Man Who Plays The Most Interesting Man In The World

also liking Gopnik's roundup of all manner of writings on how the internet is making our life better or worse

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_fey

The writing is pretty terrible, but: Ball of Fingers.

dressed like i am here to repair your aquarium

the article about near-earth-objects/NEOs in this week's is good; i'm only half way through. affectionate portraits of ex-austronaut guys, ex-astronaut probably being the best ex-thing you can be. hearing about them all sat around a conference table at a best western makes me want to watch mission to mars (should i watch mission to mars y/n)

there are some sciency types on ilx so this primer for dilettantes about a relatively underrepresented issue might be too basic if you're really into NEOs and stuff

that is either the 2nd or 3rd said sayrafiezadeh story ive liked quite a bit, has anyone read his memoir?

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/02/07/110207ta_talk_paumgarten

Enjoyed this quick profile of The Man Who Plays The Most Interesting Man In The World

nick paumgarten is one of my favorite staff writers...he had that narrative of the days surrounding the collapse of the economy a while back that was amazing/made me want to kill myself

YES that was crazy

i had a quick google around and couldn't work out which one that was - any clues?

i think it was this one - http://www.scribd.com/doc/15483403/Nick-Paumgarten-Annals-of-Finance-The-Death-of-Kings-The-New-Yorker-May-18-2009-p-40

hey thank you. made me want to kill myself should not be such a ringing endorsement but i've loved some other stuff that's ticked the same boxes

Jeffrey Goldberg piece about Haaretz and the Israeli left is amazing. Not done with it yet -- it be long.

David Remnick

Tho I'd be really curious to read a similar article by Goldberg

ha, whoops

That actually makes sense -- I tend to like Remnick's writing a lot and Goldberg's less.

Goldberg did that one about the white guy who poached African poachers, right?